In a newsroom or other broadcast environment, it is often desirable to transmit digital images taken from a variety of sources as part of a newscast, a sportscast, or for advertising. It is increasingly common for such transmitted digital images to include World Wide Web (WWW) pages or portions thereof that have been screen captured from the Internet using a personal computer, computer workstation or the like.
As is well known, a Web page often contains several visual and functional elements, including columns of text, advertisements, images, hyperlinks, live stock quote tickers, embedded programs, and the like. In the case where it is desired to broadcast a screen-captured image of a Web page for display on television screens, the image is typically manually edited prior to transmission. This is done to remove regions of the image that are not relevant to the subject-matter of the story, and/or to scale regions of the image such that they are more readable on the television screen once transmitted. For example, a newscaster may wish to draw the attention of a television audience to a particular quote on a particular Web page, but remove advertisements and other extraneous items.
It can be time-consuming to manually identify, isolate and manipulate regions in an image of a Web page. For this purpose, production staff typically employ an image cropping tool that is packaged with a set of editing tools as part of an image editing application (such as Microsoft™ Paint, for example). During image manipulation, image regions are manually copied from the original Web page image and pasted into a separate image for combining with other image elements. In order to ensure that the final image is attractive and useful, it is advantageous to identify and isolate image regions with pixel accuracy. To do so typically requires that production staff sequentially select regions and employ zoom-in, zoom-out, cropping and perhaps other digital image processing tools. Careful control of the pointer (i.e., mouse, stylus etc.) to identify the bounds of each selected image region in the digital image is required.
Techniques to crop images have been considered. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,337,925 to Cohen et al. discloses a method for determining borders of objects in a digital image in order to assist with masking of an object bound by the border. A user is required to choose an area of interest of the digital image that includes a portion of a border to be identified. The border portion is then modeled by estimating a position, direction and width of the edge zone of the border. Based on the modeled border portion, the border of an entire object in the scene is identified.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,593,944 to Nicolas et al. discloses a method and electronic system for modifying a Web page such that its content can be read by a user on an electronic device having a small screen. The method presupposes that the Web page is divided into frames, and arranges the Web page such that the frames can be displayed individually on the small screen. Each frame is scaled to the full size of the display.
Although manipulating digital images prior to transmission is often required as described above, in some instances it is also desired to manipulate broadcasted images. For example, during a live television broadcast, it is often desirable to have images available to the commentator for real-time display and further manipulation. In order to provide emphasis during a newscast, a commentator may wish to spotlight an image region that includes a popular quote. As another example, during a sportscast a commentator may wish to encircle an image region showing a goal being scored in a hockey game, then zoom in on the region to show the puck crossing the goal line.
In order to achieve real-time digital image processing, the commentator may employ a computer workstation directly, or some other user interface such as a touch system. Touch systems are well known in the art and typically include a touch screen having a touch surface on which contacts are made using a pointer in order to generate user input. The user input is then automatically conveyed to a computer executing one or more application programs. The computer uses the user input to update the image being presented on the touch screen, or to perform other actions via the application programs as though they were being operated using mouse and keyboard, for example. Many types of touch systems exist that utilize disparate technologies to identify contacts with the touch surface. These technologies include for example analog resistive, surface acoustic wave, capacitive, infrared, electromagnetic, laser-based and machine-vision detection arrangements to identify contacts with the touch surface.
In order to select a region and a processing tool (such as zoom-in, zoom-out, spotlight, highlight, or crop, as a few examples), the commentator typically pre-selects the processing tool application from a menu, picks up a pointer, and draws a border around the region of interest in the image displayed on the touch screen. The processing tool application running on the computer, which receives the user input, performs the desired processing action on the selected image region, and updates the image presented on the touch screen. Alternatively, the commentator may first select the region in the displayed image with the pointer and then select the desired processing tool application from a menu. Once selected, the processing tool application performs its processing action on the selected region, and the image presented on the touch screen is updated.
The manual selection of processing tools and identification of image regions can be time-consuming, particularly in the context of a live broadcast. This concern is addressed somewhat by application programs that permit users to first identify an image region and then select particular image processing tools using specific pointer gestures (such as an up-right motion indicating zoom, and a right-left motion indicating highlight). Other applications require receipt of a particular sequence of pointer gestures to perform various functions. For example, the video game Black & White, (developed by Lionhead Studios and published by Electronic Arts and Feral Interactive), allows players to cast spells and perform miracles by forming shapes using a sequence of mouse movements. The Web browser Opera enables a user to perform browsing gestures, as opposed to image processing operations, using small, quick mouse movements.
It is known to assign a different processing tool application to each of a set of pointers. With such an approach, the processing tool application associated with the selected pointer is automatically invoked when input is generated using that pointer. For example, a user may use a zoom pointer to identify an image region upon which zoom processing is to be conducted.
Although techniques to manipulate images prior to and after transmission are known as described above, improvements are desired. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel method and apparatus for dividing a digital image into regions for individual manipulation and for performing an image processing operation on a region in a digital image.